Peter Paret, Professor Emeritus, School of Historical Studies. From 1933 to 1945, a culture war was waged between National-Socialism and modernism in the arts. In this lecture, given in conjunction with a performance by the Princeton Symphony Orchestra featuring works by Mendelssohn, Schulhoff, and von Webern, Peter Paret explains that although their compositions were stylistically different, they were attacked for the same underlying reason: Hitler’s concept of the arts as an arena of ideological, racial, and political conflict over Germany’s present and future.

Danielle Allen, UPS Foundation Professor, School of Social Science. The political season is upon us and so, if they were not before, our newspapers, radios, computer screens, and televisions are now overfull with sound-bites; and countless people are complaining about the degradation of political conversation. But is a sound-bite really such a bad thing?